This piece appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on the 27 November 1998

Charlie Croker, Georgia real-estate developer and ex-football star, has a twenty-eight-year-old trophy wife, a Gulfstream Five private jet and a 29,000-acre plantation entirely staffed by black people. He also has Croker Concourse, less a half-empty development than a half-billion-dollar mountain of debt on which he has begun to miss capital repayments. Humiliated by the "workout team" of PlannersBanc, whose mission is to bring defaulters (or "shitheads") out of denial and into a true understanding of their situation, he begins to feel every one of his sixty years. But Charlie has always lived with debt ("you just naturally grew gills for breathing it"). Rather than give up the G-5, he lays off 15 per cent of the workforce of one of his other enterprises, Croker Global Foods. A drop in the bucket; PlannersBanc are at his throat again the same day, threatening the plantation itself. Salvation appears in the form of Fareek (the Cannon) Fanon, Georgia Tech's black all-American running back, who may or may not have date-raped Elizabeth, daughter of the white Atlanta industrialist Inman Armholster. In an attempt to defuse any race-relations crisis before it begins, the various political, sporting and business interests of Atlanta offer Charlie a deal: publicly endorse the Cannon - who hasn't yet been charged with anything anyway - and PlannersBanc will be persuaded to "completely restructure" the Croker Concourse loans. What can Charlie do? Either he speaks out in favour of Fanon, thus losing the respect of his white peers; or he loses all his money (which, as he points out, will lose him the respect of his white peers). Besides, he has already promised to support Armholster.

On the other side of the continent, Conrad Hensley, who used to earn $14 an hour working in a Global Foods freezer warehouse, finds himself redundant. His wife is irritable, his mother-in-law sarcastic. His car is towed. Modest ambitions still firmly in view, he applies for a job as a "word processor", only to find that hauling 80-kilo cartons of frozen chicken-wings around Global Foods has hypertrophied his fingers: he is too clumsy to use a keyboard. At the car-pound, dogged acceptance gives way for a split second to a kind of tepid rage. He assaults the tow-truck operator and finds himself in Alameda County gaol, where due to an administrative error his only reading matter is a book on the Stoic philo-sophers. Released by an earthquake, his head ringing with the advice of Epictetus ("the man of noble nature does not become noble all of a sudden; he must train through the winter and make ready"), Hensley travels east under a new identity, living from hand to mouth until he gets work at a nursing agency. Meanwhile, Charlie Croker, "leaking fast, right down to charisma zero", has succumbed to static flight reflex and, taking refuge in the physical deterioration of age, eyes his approaching doom from a private hospital bed. As the lives of these two converge, minor characters - swirls of energy generated by the complex socio-economic systems Charlie has set in motion - proliferate around them. Thrown back into the meat market, unable to compete with the "boys with breasts" who have replaced women, Martha, Charlie's fifty-three-year-old ex-wife, signs up for a brutal exercise regime; a minor bank officer called Raymond Peepgass begins to see how he could use the Croker Concourse debt to restore his own credit rating; while Kenny, Conrad's no-future freezer-store workmate - motto: "Crash'n'burn"; favourite Kuntry Metal lyric: "Brain DEAD brain DEAD brain DEAD" - performs the only unselfishly motivated action in the whole book.

This being Tom Wolfe, you are going to get authenticity, you are going to get facts. You are going to get lists of things. These corrupt and sometimes quite funny shenanigans are going to take place in a space so detailed that Wolfe might have been there himself. You aren't going to be told that the room was air-conditioned, or that it had a window; you are going to be positioned, "here on the thirty-second floor of the PlannersBanc tower, behind a sealed inch-thick thermoplate glass wall, with a ten-ton HVAC system chundering cold air down from the ceiling . . . ." There is something more here than the eroticism of specificity, the eroticism of objects and brands: there is an elation passed from writer to reader. I've seen this! Wolfe seems to be saying: You've seen this! We've seen these things! At its best, this texturizing process delivers exactly what he always promised; rather than interfering with narrative, it almost becomes a narrative in itself, conveyed through images of surreal specificity, like "one of those architectural photographs that are so super-sharp in detail, they make you blink. The paper it was printed on was so thick, rich, and creamy, it made you want to eat it."

It is an agreeable sensation for a chapter or two; then, all of a sudden, the book seems stuffed and hypermanic, too big for its own argument, an inflation of the very type it describes. This being Tom Wolfe, you are going to get Dickensian characterization: you are going to get larger'n life. You are going to get law firms called "Fogg Nackers Rendering & Lean" and "Wringer Fleasom & Tick". You are going to get an aerobics instructor called Mustafa Gunt. This is the sound of a writer servicing his debt to New Journalism with one hand, while he advances his case for "traditional" fiction with the other. It is also the sound of a man celebrating his passion for Americans - "people . . . who are so manic they refuse to pay attention to the odds against them, but not so manic that they're irrational".

Most manic of all, and most manically re-ported, is Charlie Croker himself, the man in full. Heroic vulgarity is the keynote here. Charlie is self-made. Charlie's favourite song is about a man with the same name as him, a "Lake Seminole fishing-boat captain from a hundred years ago", who, like Charlie, has "a back like a Jersey bull". Charlie's favourite picture, given pride of place in the cabin of his favourite airplane, is the original of an N. C. Wyeth illustration showing Jim Bow "rising up from his deathbed to fight the Mexicans at the Alamo". Even Charlie's baldness is heroic: "the kind that proclaims masculinity to burn as if there was so much testosterone surging up through his hide it had popped the hair right off the top of his head". Every new achievement of Charlie's is a monument to his old achievements, a celebration of his hyped history of himself. Most monumental - and monumentally reported - of these symbols is the plantation, dubbed "Turpmtine" back in the bad old days, after the way the slave labour pronounced the name of its major product. Even now, Charlie's servants call him "Cap'm". (Charlie himself never says "isn't" when he can say "idn't".) It is on Turpmtine's swampy acres Capt'm Charlie feels most at home, "astride his favourite Tennessee walking horse", the characteristic gait of which favours his football knee. And it's at Turpmtine that he entertains his startled guests to the spectacle of equine copulation. The stallion snorts and rolls his eyes. Strapped into a kind of bondage device, the mare switches her furled-up tail. Her vulva, "an astonishingly large, soft, moist, liverish crevice of flesh", begins to open and close, open and close in invitation. "It's called winking", explains Cap'm Charlie, and after the event, almost articulate with his own emotion, feels compelled to add: "There you have it. People can say whatever they want. They can talk about gay rights - gay rats - or anything else they want . . . . They can talk about gay rats till they're blue in the face. . . . But there . . . . There's the heart of it . . . . That's what it all boils down to in the end, the male and the female and that's it."

Much has already been made, in interview and press release, of Wolfe's intention to cut a good- sized slice of pie here, to write not just a but the blustering, broad-social-spectrum novel, something self-made and stuffed with America rich and poor, at the cusp of the millennium. In fact, he is far more at home in Charlie Croker's world than he is in Conrad Hensley's. His eye for detail shines fondly on the palazzos of the Georgia rich, those "got-rocks romantic fantasies of capitalists" yearned after in From Bauhaus to Our House. But Wolfe's scenes of the underclass come clearly labelled and with a public health warning - Working Life, Drug Culture, Jailhouse Fashion or How To Wear Your Do-Rag. Wolfe empathizes with the Charlie Crokers of the world, but he feels only sympathy for its Conrad Hensleys; and by the last third of the book, the eroticism of specificity has become a kind of squidgy soft porn. The gardens of the rich have "rolling lawns, absolutely perfectly cut" and trees "every leaf of which seemed waxed and polished by hand". The streets of the rich are, like their driveways, "laid out in suitably wasteful serpentine curves, like the floor of a valley winding its way between the eminences of the castles that rose up on either side". A Man in Full is not really about New Crackers, or the inter-national ambitions of the City of Atlanta, or the debt-aftermath of the 1980s (when, as Raymond Peepgass puts it, "tens of millions of dollars' worth of loans" were signed off "with self-destruct written all over them"). It is about success. Success lies in the expectation of success, the inflation of your spending habits. Success generates testosterone, testosterone generates confidence, and confidence generates further success. What does it matter if your Hyundai Excel family hatchback gets towed? Drive a Hyundai Excel and your life has been towed. You have already slithered too far downslope to be successful.

Wolfe could always pick a target. His career-project has been to dare you to disbelieve him, to give to the surreal, the over-the-top, the apparently gonzo, a total credibility, so that you think: "Yes, this is how vulgar life is, how piss-poor it is, how savagely self-satirizing it is. This is how bad things are." Martha's sweaty and undignified attempts to become a boy with breasts, Conrad's doomed stab at upward social mobility, almost everyone's efforts to attract the attention of the counter-articulate Fareek Fanon: in set pieces like these, a fragment of contemporary life, crazed, absurd, exceptional, convinces us for a moment that it represents the whole. The technique reaches its peak early on, in Charlie's encounter with Harry Zales, PlannersBanc's workout artiste, who uses as an index of success the size and shape of the sweat-patches beneath his victim's arms (ideally, these should merge across the front of the shirt, at which point they became known as "the saddlebags"; to raise the shithead into full consciousness of his plight is to "go for the saddlebags"). At his moment of triumph, Harry sweeps back his jacket to reveal braces decorated with a skull and crossbones.

In the end, though, it is only a kind of fuel, shovelled into the firebox of Wolfe's satirical steam engine the same way people are shovelled into the maw of the economic situation Wolfe is satirizing. Just as detail doesn't really make a narrative, set pieces don't make a novel. The facetious ending of A Man in Full resonates back along 740-odd pages to expose the evasiveness and triviality we always suspected. For a novelist, this would be a disaster; but perhaps a cultural journalist doesn't look at it that way. When Martha Croker invites Raymond Peepgass to morning coffee, she pours it from "an ornately wrought little silver coffeepot with an eccentric ivory handle". Raymond, Wolfe tells us gleefully, has "never heard of Georg Jensen silverware". Unlike his creator, Raymond is unable to name this object of desire. We are suddenly aware that the most disastrous thing that can happen to Tom Wolfe, the thing he fears most, is to be seen not to be in the know.

Copyright Times Literary Supplement 1998